The Magnus Archives - MAG 160.1 - Season 4 Q+A Part 1

Episode Date: November 28, 2019

Welcome to the first of our season break episodes.Alex and Jonny answer your questions about The Magnus Archives and Season 4. Enjoy!Thanks to this week's Patrons: Z Perkins, Evaschia, Robert Groom, Aysha U. Farah, Niamh Hemingway, Khyle, Joshua Grohman, Rachel Oney, Malcom Snipes, Alex Haidinyak, Michelle LaTorre, Oscar Marlowe, Glory Duda, Joe Smith, Alex Freeman, Cait May, Xanthe Bouma, Paul McHugh, Ciara mcCabe, & January GarciaIf you would like to join them, be sure to visit www.patreon.com/rustyquillEdited this week by Elizabeth Moffatt & Alexander J Newall.Check out our merchandise at https://www.redbubble.com/people/rustyquill/collections/708982-the-magnus-archives-s1You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast software of choice, or by visiting www.rustyquill.com/subscribePlease rate and review on your software of choice, it really helps us to spread the podcast to new listeners, so share the fear.Join our community:WEBSITE: rustyquill.comFACEBOOK: facebook.com/therustyquillTWITTER: @therustyquillREDDIT: reddit.com/r/RustyQuillEMAIL: [e-mail] Magnus Archives is a podcast distributed by Rusty Quill Ltd. and licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Sharealike 4.0 International Licence Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

This is the first radio ad you can smell. The new Cinnabon pull-apart only at Wendy's. It's ooey gooey and just five bucks for the small coffee all day long. Taxes extra at participating Wendy's until May 5th. Terms and conditions apply. Hi everyone, Alex here. I'd just like to take a moment to thank some of our patrons. Thank you all. We really appreciate your support. If you'd like to join them, go to www.patreon.com forward slash Rusty Quill and take a look at our rewards. Hi everyone, Alex again. Just taking a moment to give you a bit of Rusty Quill news ahead of today's episode. Firstly, we want to thank everyone for your support and dedication up to this point.

It's been a wild ride and we could not have hoped for better people to end the world with. Secondly, in terms of the hiatus between seasons, we know it's a long one, but we really wanted to make sure that we had enough time to get things running as smoothly as possible for the final season. We appreciate your patience in this, and as a way of saying thanks, we're aiming to be releasing special season break content every fortnight or so, the first of which is today's episode, part one of our epic Q&A session for the latest season. We have a bunch more special content planned, so keep an eye on the Magnus feed over the coming months. Finally, if you just can't handle the break even with these bonus goodies,

we'd like to recommend to you season two of Outliers, the historic fiction podcast we produce alongside historic royal palaces. This anthology tells the stories of people who have been sidelined by history, living in the shadows of real events at some of the greatest palaces ever built It features original work from award-winning contemporary writers based on actual research by historic royal palaces and is accompanied by full soundscapes and musical production from Rusty Quill This has been a really exciting project for us to have worked on and we are thrilled to be able to present it to you

You can find all of season one available via your podcatcher of choice and Season 2 is happening right now. We'll include a link in the show notes. So once you're done with this episode, why not jump on over and give it a try? We really think you're going to enjoy it and you may even recognise a few friendly voices. Anyway, that's enough from me. As always, thanks for listening and we hope you enjoy today's episode. because we have a lot. I'm here with Johnny Sims. There's a lot. There's a lot.

And we're going to be doing our best to get through all of the questions that have been raised since last time we did a Q&A. We are going to preface this, though, with going we have more than 700 and it's still going up. Like a lot, yeah.

There's so many. So it is going to be a case of, statistically speaking, your specific question isn't going to be asked. And we're sorry about that. There were apparently quite a few that have been condensed down into sort of over questions. There's a couple of questions where more than 100 people asked some version of the same question.

So we should get through quite a lot of them. But yeah, we can't do all of them. We're going to do the best we can and we're gonna shake things up a little bit instead of going through sort of blocky like one on cast one on production etc we're now going to be separating out a little bit and i'm going to be shaking it up keeping you on your toes right um gonna be honest i'm a bit nervous well this is a this is a tricky one because we've taken bigger punts with this season so so we'll see how it goes. And there are enough people listening out there now that I can feel the pressure of history upon me.

Yeah, I mean, if you want to have fun, you need to... I can't have fun. I can't have fun. Fun is... Fun jokey answers are no longer... No, it's great. You need to go on Google Trans at some point and look at the searches for Magnus Archives and look at that nice little logarithmic uh scale i don't know what's happened it's lovely right thank you everyone who's recently joined us to

listen we 100 value you and are only a little bit scared oh no he's he's terrified i'm i'm at this point so far beyond the pale you just kind of roll with it it's like surfing an enormous wave alex hasn't had feelings in some years it It's true. In fact, straight out the gate, I'm going to use that as my in. So the first of our questions to do with cast, Alex, why do you hate Martin so much? That's a real good question. Okay, this is a very simple question that has come up more than once. I don't actively hate Martin. I just don't like him. And I've said it before, so I will just have to repeat my answer from before, which is he is a younger version of me when it comes to characterization and when it comes to script editing I've also done that as well it is a version of me at least parts of him are a version

of me from a while ago that needed to learn and has now learned actually through season four that going around just trying to set yourself on fire to keep everyone else warm doesn't work um so I'm actually okay with Martin by the end of season four for the simple reason that he stopped doing that thing. Yeah. So I'm okay with Martin now. I really like him as a character. I find him through season four, he was quite difficult to write

because often there would be plot points that I needed him to deliver. And every time I tried I needed him to deliver, and every time I tried to write him delivering them, it sounded... It didn't sound right. It just sounded false in his voice. Well, it's because Martin's default season four became, I'm kind of pissy right now, which makes exposition a bit difficult. But we got there. Oh, and that one's from Antiva. I need to remember to read the names. Thank you.

Right, so we have a production question for that one's from Antiva. I need to remember to read the names. Thank you. Right. So we have a production question for both of us from Benja. How do you feel about being so close to the end of Magnus? Excited and a little bit nervous, mainly. Yeah, I think for myself, we're entering. So we're past the danger period of season four, which was everyone might hate us for what we did. Yeah, the big climax of season four is always going to be the part of the whole series that we were most worried about. It's been building for four seasons. For me, End of Magnus is scary for the same reason that any project you do, which is scary,

which is you do your finale and everyone goes, that was fantastic. And then you're like, cool, here's this other thing that we're now working on that we think you'll really enjoy. And everyone goes, no, I'm good. One project per creative per lifetime. That's the scare. That's the fear. Yeah, that is a bit worrisome.

Also, I have some slight nerves about season five just because for season four we knew the big drop we were going towards. And we know the end of season four we knew the big drop we were going towards and while like we know the we know the the end of season five we're going to but it's a different sort of journey denouement are hard yeah i think it's going to be the most technically difficult one for us to write without it necessarily being the most risky in terms of like ending the world with a season to go is a higher risk i'm just glad that here on tape you will confirm that you're happy for us to do approximately 40 unknowings uh in terms of audio editing um yeah i'm absolutely you can write as many unknowns as you want we're not

going to make them so you can just make those on your own get yourself a wobble board and just have some fun is that what you did i mean i'm not going to go into that unless it's a question so on to a story question from ashley desert willow wilson limited swearing is done for real world release reasons but is there any reason for it within the law does the eye just not like cursing in its statements slash meals i mean there's no law reason except that the characters we're writing aren't particularly sweary. And I'm fairly certain they would have been more if I wasn't like, no. I mean, oh yeah. This hard grizzled convict also cares a lot about cursing. If it's of interest to anyone, there was the piecemeal episode.

It was where this first came to the fore. was the piecemeal episode. It was where this first came to the fore because the first draft of that, I filled it chock full of swears and Alex largely actually as a catalyst to have the conversation. And we had the conversation and the swearing in that one was toned back a bit

and we landed at the level that we've more or less continued. Personally, from a writing point of view, I 100% agree with Alex that it's really useful to be able to have some linguistic escalation available to you, which is hard when you've got a constant stream of expletives. Pretty much that. I don't really have anything to add to that. Bang on. Okay, this one's a writing question. of uh expletives pretty much that i don't really have anything to add to that bang on okay this

one's a writing question so this is from sigh sy this season had a lot of focus on characters emotional conditions motivations and interpersonal relationships all dealing with a lot of nuance what part was the hardest to write convey in your opinion and what part did you want to get exactly right the most i am going to struggle to pick the most i could pick sort of like a highlight reel because we had a lot in this one yeah when we were doing season planning for this one we actually put little sort of red markers on the bits that we knew we were going to have to focus on so stuff like melanie's decision melanie's decision, I think, is one of the, like, a lot of the series was contextualising. Because the idea of Melanie doing that as an actually mentally healthy act, if that makes sense. It's really difficult.

It was something we really wanted to dive into, but not just from an emotional writing point of view, but from, I mean, there are people who are blind and saying, oh, this horrible thing, this terrible thing of being blind. Like, there's a lot to consider in order to not make it a really... Gauche. I was going to say s***, but a really bad piece of representation

and we wanted to take care to not do that. Also treading the line for peter in terms of everyone hates peter because he's a real world villain instead of a i'm gonna eat your brains villain yeah the lonely like diving into the lonely i hadn't quite anticipated how close it would hew to real world depression and it it was one of those things that when you read it back, it's obvious, but it was only through the writing that I started to realise, oh, this is touching on some very real stuff. And so that was a very tricky line to walk.

Another one that I think we put a marker down, but actually turned out to seem to come out better than we feared it might, is the sort of pseudo addiction angle on the um archivist statement giving where that was one that we were aware could get away from you if you weren't being careful about it but i don't think i think it it seemed to land well yeah it seemed to land the way we wanted which was not as a lazy analog yeah i mean as a as a whole because season three was very dynamic very going out there like taking action we wanted season four to be much more emotion focused for the the plot and the emotional arcs to be much more one and the same i agree i think for what

it's worth there are more but then we're just going to start listing episodes and reasons we had to be careful with every relationship every relationship that got any play in the series uh which is all of them and you know what here's one little extra bonus one which made me chuckle a bonus again I don't actually engage in the fan base that much anymore just due to time constraints if nothing else um but hearing that people were start of getting getting a bit antsy with basira for being a bit sort of steamrollery and things oh yeah but the fact that basira's the one who was right all season to for a given for a given value of right. Like, I mean, this is not a season where there is anyone who is right. I'm just saying the archivist did end the world.

And if Basira had just given him a harder time, he might not have done. If by a harder time you mean, you know, like a... Just a complete stone cold murdering. But, well, if she could, if she could have. Who's to say? Who's to say? But no, like, this is the thing. There are no simple answers. There are no like, oh, this person was right and should have just done this.

That was the point of the season. On to a non-story one this time. This one is from, quote, loads of people. Quote loads of people. Oh, okay. As in that's an actual number, loads of people. Quote loads, oh, okay. As in that's an actual number, not the name. Bracing myself. How much do you keep up with social media to see what fans are saying about Magnus,

or does Anil keep tabs on all of us Panopticon style and alert you when something significant comes up? I can answer for me, I can't answer for Johnny. Sure. Very much the latter for me at this point. It's like a personalised Google me at this point it's like a personalized google alert from annal who's like listen everyone does worry that you are anti-martin is that a thing that we're going to need to discuss but i don't i haven't really had much chance to dive into anything i

it's largely because people were like oh johnny you're writing lots of horrible things happening to our beloved martin and i'm like yes it's a horror it's a horror show and they're like why do you hate martin i'm like actually it's it's mostly alex and so it's it's my fault i have 100 outsourced uh fan discontent onto you that's all good because you're more insulated from it ultimately yeah because if anyone threatens me i can just make martin sadder martin sadder it's very true um i tend to on release day i will keep half an eye on uh the reddit or the tumblr and i used to be the discord i still sometimes do but it goes it goes very fast and i generally don't have a chance to actually properly engage with it. So immediately after an episode drops, I'll generally be trying to get a sense for how it's gone down and sense for what the reaction is. But I do rely on Anil to let me know if there's any problems or anything that's come up on social media that is like, oh, I should probably address that.

up uh on social media that is like oh i should probably address that see i feel like i've started to get a bit of reputation as gandalf the gray where i just i only tend to turn up in the discord now if something's going wrong as in like technically wrong and i need to make sure it's releasing properly so i mostly turn up with bad news and then leave to be fair i'm i'm enjoying my status as uh essentially a uh some sort of chaos god within the the discord where i'll just turn up and everyone's like oh johnny's here and then i'll leave johnny and then you'll leave yeah you'll leave and i'll to clean up all of the mess that we make um okay cool i'm gonna jump back onto a cast one uh oh one i've sort of answered already actually it's from Erin.

How have your feelings on Martin as a character changed since season one? I can summarise this one really quickly. Yep. Much like a certain type of smelly cheese, Martin needed an ageing and maturing process in order to reach his full flavourful potential. At the start, he was very, very fluffy and just there as a nice little foil.

As things progressed, it was, oh, there's a person underneath the foil. Oh, they're wonderful. Oh, they're not wonderful. They're problematic. By season four, end of season four, I'm actually, I'm fine with Martin now. He's matured nicely.

He is ready to be spread over a delicious cracker and eaten. For me, it's less a cheese metaphor and more. In season one, Martin was a fluffy character to unleash some worms on. Pretty much. And since then, he's very much deep. And we always had the overall plan for his arc, but planning an arc and getting a sense of how that arc progresses, two very different things. This is from Gio. In previous seasons, it has appeared that the only people

who have had supernatural encounters have been the ones giving statements to the Magnus Institute. But in season four, we've heard about the archivist getting statements from essentially random people on the street. Approximately what percentage of people in the Magnusverse have had an encounter with one of the entities? Well, I mean, they're random

people on the street, but they're random people on the street who have had encounters with the entities uh it's it's not the case that everyone who's had an encounter with the entities has gone to the magnus institute i mean i haven't really thought about it but if i was going to just guess a number i'd say maybe five to ten percent of the people in the magnus world who have had an encounter with the entities have ended up reporting it to the magnus institute or one of the other organizations running the numbers in my head on the fly in order for this universe to make any sense the percentage of the general population that has been exposed to the genuinely supernatural must be less

than about one percent i'd say probably everyone has brushed up against them. Really? Just in the sense of, like, I mean, everyone has that thing that they're like, someone, is there someone? No. Okay, I'm fine. That it must be less than 1% of the student in any way. Yeah, maybe like 10% to 15% have had, like, a spook.

What you might think of as just, just like a slightly ghostly encounter that is not significant enough to delve into didn't really go anywhere yeah and maybe maybe 0.1 have had a legitimate like it's a small enough number that it's not that they're not going to speak up to anyone who's not like hey tell me your story alex narratologist here i recommend anyone interested in that reading up on the technique of writing known as the masquerade it's a trope or a conceit the idea being there's the world behind the world but there's quite a lot of writing on how many people within your world are allowed to see behind that curtain before your world breaks yeah um i'm not going to go into it here it's a

whole field of study but it's interesting i'd recommend it on to another writing question this one's from amber which would you each consider more important resolving all the mysteries you created or giving compelling arcs to all the characters you created do you ever find there is a difficulty in balancing those two things in the story uh arcs and yes i would agree for the simple reason that for a character arc if you've left the character arc unfinished you are wrong yes like you have you've done a bad story if you leave a mystery unanswered as long as it is a type of mystery that is allowed to be unanswered yeah in some way it's not quite the dichotomy that it might be presented as because if you know the answer to the mystery when you start the mystery then not answering it is less of a danger as long as it stays consistent like you don't change your answer halfway through yeah like anyone which happens

the danger is the urge to change the mystery to better support character arcs or to change character arcs to better support the mystery really dangerous that's where the i mean and that's where the balancing act is uh and i think there are a few in magnus that have slightly changed their shape uh or the answers as they've gotten deeper effectively have uh interacted more with people's character arcs but this is one of the advantages of writing the mysteries where the wider answer to the mystery is categorically known at the start but a lot of the smaller details a lot of the smaller threads are still unconnected and those are the things that can be threaded through a character arc i think an unsatisfying character arc is more of a weakness than an unsatisfying mystery. I've never thought of it before. I suppose an unanswered character arc is just a mess.

An unanswered mystery is still a mystery. It's just an unanswered one. It's why stuff that is pure mystery tends not to have a character arc. Yeah. I mean, you read a Poirot book. Poirot's not having a character arc. But what if he doesn't solve this one, Johnny? His character arc is man who has not solved a murder. Solves a murder. Arcing into man who has solved a murder.

And it's because, yeah, so there's no conflict there between arc and mystery. I don't know. I'd love to read a Poirot where it's the one where he doesn't solve the mystery and he just has to deal. Well, I mean, if you do want a Poirot mystery that has an arc for him uh curtain poirot's last case is probably the one like the last poirot mystery because there's an arc okay i mean i'm not gonna say what it is because spoilers you are beyond my sphere of knowledge at this point poirot is not something i've done a deep dive wow that deep dive is really good right we, we're going to jump to a misc. A little Belgian solves crimes. It's wonderful.

We're going to jump to a misc, which is from Lucille. How do you feel about the growth of the fan community during this last season and the increase in fan creations on cosplay and so on, as well as often high trending on Tumblr after the release? I mean, short answer, terrified. Good. The correct answer is good. It's a really interesting thing because as the fandom has grown, it's no longer a monolith. Well, it was never a monolith, obviously, but it's no longer a more or less unified group.

I need to be a lot more careful how i interact because things that i would say potentially ingest like they have resins now i can't simply have i can't have an opinion on my work because my opinion is not an opinion my opinion is something that people can take and deploy in fandom context and it's it's very much like I have made a big party. And as I've made this big party, I myself have grown so that I am now a huge stone giant. So if he attempts to attend the party, he will destroy the party and everyone will die

because I will crush them with my giant stone hands. That's how I feel. Oh, you're the kid that made the enormous Lego landscape that got so big you can't play with it anymore. Uh, yes. See, I have it far easier. I just have my new shield, which is working really well, which is, mate, I just work here.

I'm the mechanic that you bring your story to, and I'm like, well, problem is there, you've got a bus carburetor in, mate, your character art, that's well out, that's going to need completely replacing, mate. Okay, we're going to jump on to a cast one again. Cast Landman, which guest voice actor were you most excited or just very excited to have on this season?

That's really hard, actually, because I wasn't here for most of the guest recordings. This season has had you out of the studio more than any other, actually. Yeah, like, I really was looking forward to working with Alistair. How did that go? And did we have any... I think we had one scene that we actually recorded together. Alistair, who plays Peter Lucas, has never been in the same room,

apart from once in passing to say hello as the other was leaving, with Ben, who plays Elias. Elias and Peter have never been in the same room for a recording. That's bananas. Yes. in passing to say hello as the other was leaving with ben who plays elias elias and peter have never been in the same room for a recording that's bananas yes uh also uh john henry who played uh arthur nolan we're friends but we're we never really see each other so i was really looking forward to to actually uh hanging out to do something wasn't there wasn't there um so yeah everyone it's been lovely okay so yeah you can answer this question so i was very happy to get to work more with alistair and and i have to like in front of everyone i have to

give him a big thanks because out of everyone he ran into an enormous technical glitch twice in a row oh yeah not avoidable not a thing that we could necessarily prep for you know mechanical failures happen that kind of thing and the absolute trooper turned up for two massive pickup sessions in a row, recording opposite people who weren't here. So he's recording in isolation, making enormous journeys to do it. So he sort of became my MVP by the end of the season. He is officially the loveliest man. I had good fun as well working with Kareem.

Oh, yeah. Just because he had the most fun. Where a lot of the direction consisted of, are we thinking more, I want to kill everyone in the room? Or are we thinking more like, here are some cookies? I actually met Kareem for the first time last night. And he's lovely. I was also really glad to get Fran and Ian.

That's Trevor and Julia back in the studio. Oh, yes, I was there with them to get Fran and Ian, that's Trevor and Julia, back in the studio. Oh yes, I was there with them. That's fun. I always enjoy recording with them. Because not many people know as well, Ian originally started as an editor for us. He was editing with Rusty Quill for like a year and then suddenly went, also I'm a professional performer. I'm like, well, bury the lead. So yeah, it was good getting them back into the studio that was that was good fun but honestly this season's kind of been a little bit of a candy store where i can say that now at the time it meant all casting was a nightmare but after the fact it does mean oh i got to work with this person and this person but yeah i think alistair has to win most mvp and i know he's listening so he's looking at you okay i'm going to jump onto a production question that was weird i'm sorry

this is one's from planets and magic and i should have seen this one coming i'm going to read this in the tone i believe it was intended okay alex how's it been directing this season that's a question that's written literally but it's definitely meant as a how you doing i can probably answer it for you, actually, if you'd like. Go for it. Directing's been fine. Directing's actually been quite fun. I've got to work with a lot of good people.

The editing and production has been bad. Yeah, it's been a bit hellish this year. There were a couple of issues we had to do with sort of delayed casting and things like that which meant that we had a lot of very short turnarounds due to stuff happens also there was oh what was that there was something that was happening in september that was it was a it was a big there was like a massive problem i remember um someone someone was getting married that was not a problem problem, I remember. Someone was getting married, I think. That was not a problem. That was factored in.

That was the only thing that was actually fine. That was, yes, I got married. I got married during this season, which was fine. That all went swimmingly. It was lovely. We got very damp in Wales. It was a very, very complicated season this year if i was being cruel potentially over complicated that would be cruel i don't know what yeah like really cut i feel like anything

that we shifted for the sake of production we we bent the story as far as we could before the story would literally change if we'd made production easier we would have made the story worse which might have been a trade worth making at certain points but it's not one we did so yeah there's a reason that we're taking a longer season break and a bigger run-up because you can only sprint for so long basically and yeah editors were real troopers on this one actually there was a lot of with the alistair softs a good example hi you were gonna have a week for this. It went wrong. We did a rerecord. It went wrong. You have two days to do a week's work and people stepped up. So yeah, that was amazing. So Johnny's right. Directing? Yes. Production? No.

Onto another story one. This is from Atomic Pleb. As an ace person... Sorry, it's just a great name. It's a good name. As an ace person, it's just a great name it's a good name as an ace person it really means a lot to have john as asexual representation in a podcast can i ask at what point in planning the podcast you decided to make that happen that's a very good question and it's a difficult one to answer because it's one of those where it wormed its way into sort of essentially my head canon quite early in the writing process. And then later, I think during season two, when it started to actually become more textually relevant, we sort of were discussing it and we nailed down the idea. But it's a really tricky,

it's a tricky question to answer as to at what point that character inkling became a canonical facet the issue is it gets muddied up at our end in a way we haven't really discussed before in the during initial like story development and pitching and so on it was explicitly stated that the archivist that you have to discuss what type of story you're telling and at the straight out the gate we were like cool archivist does the archivist have any kind of uh romantic arcs at all through this and we were both like this isn't a romance yeah it's a horror joke was on us well yeah but what that did is that muddied the waters a bit so genuinely yeah headcanon pretty much from the outset but i it sounds the thing is like i remember to be a thing the thing is i remember a conversation

at some point during season one where we were sort of discussing what we thought the various characters' sexualities were. Yeah, yeah. And it was like, oh, yeah, no, I think John's ace. And Alex was like, yeah, no, that sounds right. But at the same time, that wasn't a planning conversation in the same way. Yeah, it wasn't us going, we need to really have a sit down. I think out of everything from the entire series to date, that's been probably the biggest one that's had the largest impact that I most underestimated.

Yeah, I did not anticipate the reaction and it's lovely. But yeah, I didn't anticipate it would resonate as hard as it has. It isn't something we put a little red mark on a make sure you handle this correctly. I feel like we have. I think so. I don't think we would have made it explicit if we weren't confident we'd done it reasonably thoughtfully. So we have one question set aside, which is the elephant in the room question, which is a big question

and we knew we'd end up having to answer. So this one is from, quote, loads of people. Sure. Does the archivist slash John reciprocate Martin's romantic feelings for him? People have been commenting on the ambiguity of the nature of his feelings. And would there be an explicit or thorial confirmation on whether those feelings are romantic or not? So this is both a very simple answer and a very complicated answer.

Yes. The simple answer is yes, he reciprocates. It's a romance. At least I have written it as a romance. It has been intended. It is intended as a romance. However, there is obviously a much bigger conversation about death of the author.

And if that's not how people read it, I wrote a lot of drafts of 159. And there were a lot of versions where the archivist's emotional state during it was a lot more explicit. And they all rang incredibly false. They didn't work. Because unfortunately, we've spent four seasons building up a character who is an emotional wreck. He's an emotional lockdown.

Yeah. He's a mess of a not human. And so I think the scenes that we ended up having are the most true to the characters. I think there probably will be more explicit aspects to it going into season five i believe so yeah but at the same time i as the author cannot tell people that they are wrong for interpreting things in a different way like i don't think that people who read it as platonic are necessarily you know wrong in how they respond to the text but yeah authorial intention is it as uh romantic but also it's a horror series and it's it was the focus of season four because it was the emotional

core that led to uh the culmination of the series but it's going to take more of a back seat i think in season five i think there's two things to take away from it is one you can't tell someone how to receive a text and you shouldn't tell someone how to receive a text because that's not how art works um so if someone is receiving a text differently to you that's fine. The other one I would say that's quite important is the ambiguity in 159 especially was not intended as a way of being deliberately ambiguous so people were left guessing. It was a symptom of accurate characterisation in terms of how they communicate with one another. I'll be honest, I mean, me it was very much uh like a culmination of a culmination of a love story scene and it saddens me a bit that the fact that there wasn't the specific words yes i love you too martin and then they kiss

yeah oh that is one thing i will say unequivocably. You will never hear a kiss in the Magnus Archives because audio-only kisses are the worst thing in the world. They sound terrible. It's not an option. No one is kissing. No one is kissing in the Magnus Archives. There are a couple of ways of making it less offensive on the ear, but it still sounds like someone's eating chewing gum at you.

It doesn't work on audio, I'm afraid. It never will. It's the nature of humans and ears no one likes other people kissing in their ears in that way it doesn't work so yeah fundamentally it is intended as a romance uh it will continue to be so through season five though it will not be the focus uh but at the same time if you interpret it differently if your reactions to the text are different uh i mean you're not wrong because it's art that's how it works cool a separate writing question now yes yes this one's from dr brain box have the predictions slash theories on reddit influence your storytelling in any way a short answer no i use the different social medias in to sort of check different things

discord i generally use to check the immediate fan reaction to an episode twitter i mean that tends to be where i actually engage with people tumblr i use use to check how the emotional arcs of characters are being received, and Reddit I use to check how many people are successfully guessing, well, were successfully guessing about the mystery, because generally with any given mystery, you want a few people on Reddit to be right about it, and quite a few to be kind of right about it and a few more to be absolutely wrong. And I really my favourite is if someone's absolutely wrong and the loudest in the room. Yeah, that's that's great. But occasionally you'll stumble across a thread. You'll be like, oh, no, that's that's exactly you've you've got it.

I can I can say this now. There's been at least one, maybe two. This is across all social media, so there's no way you'll be able to track them down, who said, Hi, I have a little pet theory. It's probably nothing. And then just laid it out. Just laid out every beat, the whole lot's there.

Yes, you got it, mate. Good for you. And then about 40 people will come in going, I'm not so sure. Or actually quite a few people will write, that's a good theory, but there's this or this or this that means that it probably won't be the case yeah so when you have a reveal of a mystery you want a good balance of people feeling validated people feeling sort of half validated

half surprised and people who just straight up didn't see it coming and so i tend to use reddit to check where people are sitting on that sort of scale. From Mellybean, a lot of fans were throwing around theories and two big ones turned out to be true, specifically the Jonah-Elias overlap and the Watcher's Crown. Is it cool that the fans have managed to predict this or is it incredibly frustrating and annoying? No, it's brilliant. Yes, great. It means that you've done the job right. Yeah, absolutely. The prioritisation of shocking everyone with a big twist

is the bane of long-term mystery writing. It is a trap. Because over the long term, if you've done enough foreshadowing that the twist is going to feel earned, people are going to guess it. And if you see that guess happening and you feel, oh no, they've guessed the twist.

I need to change the twist. It's a trap. You're absolutely shooting your mystery in the foot and making it much less satisfying just because you don't realise that half the joy of a solved mystery is the validation of the people who got it right. Yeah. I mean, don't get me wrong. Feel free if people are getting too close to throw more red herrings in the mix oh yeah but

that's different there's the there's the old uh adage what an ending needs to be both surprising and uh inevitable yeah that is true what it doesn't mean is that your ending needs to shock the very foundations of every reader yeah what it just means is that more people will go ah that's it that's that's the goal is a little also the more people have predicted the twist the better you need to write the reveal fundamentally yeah that's fair actually it does raise the stakes i'm very very happy with how we actually dealt with the Jonah Elias reveal because everyone kind of guessed it

it's something we'd foreshadowed quite heavily so we really went all out on the the flavour the actual the actual writing of the reveal so that it's not a oh my god I never guessed it's yes I was right.

And this is really cool. There's a benefit actually to not reinventing the world. I mean, okay, bad choice of words. But your reveal doesn't have to be so enormous because it reduces the expositionary load as well. If you need to have a massive, enormous shocker that's coming from nowhere, that means that your villain has to sit down and monologue. And I't mean monologue like we got away with i mean proper so two weeks ago i

did this and then i did that we've managed to cover it up to a degree but the more that your mystery makes sense and you aren't having to do that shoehorning in at the end the less clunky it's gonna feel like our monologue i was quite happy because it was mainly recontextualization yeah exactly it was saying oh yeah remember this thing actually it fits in in this way as opposed to well in order to support this twist here's some new information yeah so this is from four chinchillas one raincoat presumably an undersized raincoat chinchillas not very large but if they get wet you've got to dry them very carefully and make sure they get a dust bath. Otherwise, they can go mouldy and die. It's true.

Their fur is so dense, it does not dry naturally. It's true. What's been the worst normal job you've ever had? All of them. I will jump in here. Day jobs are bad. And say my track record for work is longer than it should be due to me starting way younger than i should have and additionally most of my first jobs as a result were really illegal

enterprises that got shut down i was not wow i was not being illegal i didn't know this uh so let's i can i can run through the list there was one job where it turned out every monday they hired people right he worked with them for a week and then they fired everyone on the friday but they I know this. So I can run through the list. There was one job where it turned out every Monday they hired people. You worked with them for a week and then they fired everyone on the Friday. But they said, of course, come back on Monday and we'll rehire you. Meaning that their tax outlay for all employment was zero. Meaning that they had all these sales-based things that were not applicable. That's one example.

There's been another one. A fine education for an entrepreneur. There was another one where it was fine an entrepreneur there was there was another one where it was fine but i got told off a lot because i wrote something down at some point and it turns out that the cost of shredders for the immediate evacuation of the office if it was audited was so high that they were like just remember things because they couldn't afford the shredders to shred their records like my work history is checkered and messy with other people's immoral decisions my work history is broadly dull uh i've generally worked uh a series of just incredibly medium low-key demoralizing but fundamentally not egregious office jobs we actually met we actually met uh at

one of my favorite jobs actually genuinely one of the cushiest gigs i ever got so it was uh night shift seven days uh on seven days off uh and you'd get in at 10 30 you'd leave at 6 30 and you'd spend the evening it was a media monitoring company so you were you were writing article summaries and checking that everything that had come into the system uh had come in correctly and there weren't any sort of irrelevant or um like articles that whatever client wouldn't want to see and then you were hidden space bar to reject them and it was silent utterly silent i've never heard eight like 80 people at one point just pure silence it took about 40 of your brain and the rest this was actually this was about what six years ago now i spun up a company at the same time as working it in the same office on the same computers

and i was listening to this was before the sort of the podcast boom had really hit yeah uh so i was listening to uh a lot of pseudopod uh and a lot of um please tell me lights out yeah no no like this was when i was like because there weren't as many sort of horror podcasts i found this uh archive of old vintage radio shows, and I was listening to sort of Nightfall from the 80s, and yeah, Lights Out with all its ionized yeast adverts. Five to ten pounds of good new flesh. Good new flesh.

I'm just so tired of this war job of mine. I sure am discouraged. If only I had more flesh say why don't you try ionized yeast it costs just pennies a day maybe you need more vitamin b12 and iron um yeah uh and we we sort of met in the not silent but still pretty subdued kitchen of that job. True. Though we didn't actually start working together for a couple of years until I'd actually left that job. We met but didn't really do anything.

We met and got on really well. And then the year I left, you came to see the mechs up at the Fringe. Yeah, same. We got on really well. Johnny kept going on about this weird creative gig that he was doing. He was like, I'm sure it's good. I'm sure it's fine. or... Johnny kept going on about this weird creative gig that he was doing. He's like, I'm sure it's good. I'm sure it's fine. Like, sure. And then I actually took a pun

and went, oh no, it's really good. I'm the bad person. Oh. To be fair, you say that, but like the number of friends I have who do really good creative things and every time they're like, oh yeah, I've been working on this. this and i'm like i still haven't gotten around to actually a little bit watch it

it's uh so i can't really uh i can i can't really be mad at anyone else for uh not what i've said it before i have bought four albums in my life paul simon's graceland and three mechanisms albums that's it that's all the albums i've ever bought we've gone a little bit off topic from what jobs have you worked bring it back on we need to bring it back on okay cool um good question from uh is it flaming or flamin cobble i think it's flamin cobbles uh one of our vintage fans so was it intended to have alex play jared hopworth or was that a late decision out of necessity and how far did that influence the voice distortion in that episode there's about three layers to this question yep first one is there were casting issues which made things awkward so we do a casting system

where there's like a tier of people where there's like six people per role and then you have like a highest preference and lowest preference and it's not based on talent a lot of it's based on like availability and I mean and stuff like that. So ultimately, we were working our way through the list. One of those things about this industry, certainly at this level, is being able to show up on time and get stuff done is often a lot more important than being the absolute best voice actor in the room. The sad truth is there is no shortage of talent in the world,

but there is arguably a shortage of conscientiousness sometimes. So it sounds strange, but yeah, turning up on time is a big plus. So as it stood, we ended up with... Full disclosure, I overslept this morning. I was an hour late. But he's not been an hour late every single time. No. Sometimes two hours. So in terms of jared hopworth we actually ended up going through pretty much all of our

choices quite quickly also we did something that you shouldn't ever do don't do avoid this kids learn from our mistakes don't smoke behind the bike sheds and also don't go oh you know what actually this person that we were going to cast as jared hopworth would work really even better in this other role oh yeah just slowly exhaust your jared hopworth options going well they're gonna be better here they're gonna be better here and then we suddenly realized that we'd given away all our jared hopworths well not and the ones that we hadn't given away couldn't turned out literally couldn't do it they weren't in the country things like that so then i ended up doing a test audio showing that i could do it however it is a bit frustrating to me in that it

didn't need as much vocal messing around as it had the reason for a lot of them vocal messing around is it's in the corridors oh yeah corridors are the most sorry about that messed up soundscape that there actually is like it's the one that changes so it's the most we were changing alex's voice so it wasn't as recognizable we were adding in some meat sounds because meat sounds they're good uh and then we were also adding corridor distortion for just a cocktail of uh in retrospect potentially on optimum yeah so we ended up in a situation where it ended up having a lot more effects than you really should squeeze into MP3, but it was just a story thing, so unavoidable.

He's a man made of meat in a corridor made of unreality who is three to five times the size of a normal human being. Sorry. These things stack up. So this is a nice quick one that relates to stuff we said earlier, which is Sazan Dorable. You've both talked in the past about the problem of including swearing in the show. What was the process that led to Martin, who's being known for being polite and voiced by Alex,

drop an F-bomb? I wrote it in the script. Alex looked at it and said, yeah, this is the right time. And I said, yeah, isn't it? Because while it wasn't the most plot bomb revelation, from a personal point of view, from the character's point of view this was possibly the biggest discovery this was a discovery that most recontextualized everything about their situation plus i mean from a sake of script efficiency i can't even

is three words yeah and that expletive is two words so you know it's an optimum choice we we drafted the the scene a couple of times and that was easily the the best version of it plus it was funny it was funny i like funny and also shortly after we'd recorded it i stumbled across the fact that there was a tumblr that was called has my something like has martin blackwood said yet oh yeah we hadn't we weren't aware of it until after we'd done the recording oh you sweet summer child you don't realize you're a countdown right i'm going to jump on to another story because you're getting through this now which

is nice this is from bo jester real did the desolation really kill gertrude's cat and was that her primary motivation for waging war on the fears because that's pretty realistic for a cat person i don't know there are some mysteries as we've established that don't need answers although And was that her primary motivation for waging war on the fears? Because that's pretty realistic for a cat person. I don't know. There are some mysteries, as we've established, that don't need answers. Although I've gotten a very small amount of trouble for this, because my stated policy, one of the stated rules of Magnus, is if we meet an animal, if we meet a pet specifically,

it won't come to harm within the episode. And some people feel that Gertrude's theoretical possible cat breaches that rule, which I personally disagree with because, I mean, there is animal death in the Magnus archives. The point of the rule comes out of arachnophobia with Major Tom because we actually got a surprising amount of feedback saying that people were having legitimate difficulty listening through the episode

because as soon as Major Tom was introduced, it took them out of it because they were too busy worrying about the well-being of the cat to actually properly engage with the horror. So it's very much... So while also I don't particularly like violence against animals or animal death in this sort of thing, but it is very much a practical rule saying, no, if you meet an animal animal if you meet a pet specifically within the context of an episode

you don't need to worry about it dying you can assume it's safe and engage with the story a better way to say it be if in all of these historical accounts that we've had from gertrude there was a cat present that gertrude was spending loads of time with. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And having a chill. You don't kill the cat as a punishment for another character. But at the same time, I don't feel like saying that there might theoretically have been a cat who died 50 years ago actually breaches that rule. Also, it might not have existed. It might have been a joke. I don't know. No, you heard it here first, everyone.

Johnny Sims hates cats. I have two cats. Hates cats. Don't say these things. Okay, we heard it here first, everyone. Johnny Sims hates cats. I have two cats. Hates cats. Don't say those things. Okay, we're on to a writing one again. This is from Chris Sterling. Was it your intent from the get-go to have every major character in the Magnus archives being some flavour of queer, or was it just a coincidence?

I mean, not from the beginning. I would go so far as to say neither. No. We didn't have, like, a checkbox list that we have to hit but similarly coincidence implies that you're just kind of freewheeling it and you don't put any thought well i mean there were some that we obviously put thought in because the relationships are important and like there are i mean there are plenty of characters whose sexuality has never been explicitly addressed.

Also, you get a lot of straight characters out there. It's nice to have some others. It opens story options up as well. If you're going to be a horrible puppet master story writer, you get more options with a broader palette of characters. You just do. It makes things easier, not harder. Yeah. Follow-up question related to that from Eliza.

How do you avoid tropes like queerbaiting and bury your gaze as a thing when writing? A lot of it is just trying to be thoughtful, be aware of these tropes, and have a wide enough context and a diverse enough cast and world that you have story options, but they don't necessarily push you into these problematic tropes. Yeah, I couldn't really add anything to that. It's as straightforward as you can really get in an answer. It's like there are plenty of female characters who do conform to certain, oh, this isn't a great stereotype.

Sure. But at the same time, there are enough female characters that it's not, oh, there's one female character and she is this problematic stereotype. Yeah. Honestly, if you just have a broad enough set

of people within your world that's properly balanced. And you treat them like people. And you all treat everyone the same. You treat them like characters rather than like types we're going to move across then to uh another misquam this is from abigool and also i know a few people have asked this but were there any good cows i mean obviously that's a great daft question you

ever seen scottish cows cows they're great they these fluffly, shaggy things. And depending where you go, they're left alone for like a month at a time, easy if not more. They're just utterly unguarded, easily huggable. Doing their own thing. I mean, I cannot take any responsibility for anyone who attempts to hug a Highland cow. So if you injure yourself doing so, that's not on me. That's Alex's fault. I mean, statistically speaking, they're one of the most dangerous animals. Really?

A lot of people act really dumb around cows, and that's why. Huh. A cow is, when you get up close, spot Alex who grew up in the middle of nowhere, and it doesn't come up that often. Cows are both very, very big and meaty animals that everyone thinks are dumb, and you can do anything you want around them. That tends to go badly. Being dumb around cows is the same as being dumb around any other animal so you heard it here second don't be dumb around cows but there were good cows because great cows scotland's full of

them okay we are going to jump all the way back around to a castron then this is for you johnny well it's sort of for you you'll see what i'm getting at. So this is from Gilligan Mungus. Okay. Read as written. Does your mom know... Sorry, my what? Mom. Etymologically, I think it is related to the word mother. Oh, my mom. Yes.

Sorry, that'll be it. Does your mom know how much the fandom absolutely loves her portrayal of Gertrude? What does she think of her immense popularity? She's vaguely aware. I haven't actually spoken to her about it since uh 160 dropped um actually yeah no but she's she's having a real good time uh in terms of the reception of gertrude i remember um early in season four uh i i'd given her a script uh for gertrude being particularly ruthless about something she gave me a call that we were arranging at the recording she's like Gertrude being particularly ruthless about something, she gave me a call and we were arranging the recording.

She's like, Gertrude, I mean, you know, she's a bit of a bee, isn't she? And I was like, yes, mother, she's quite ruthless. So, yeah, she's having a real good time with it. Basically, I was really disappointing this season because I didn't allow a cackle. What? She gave a cackle? No, no, no, she was because i didn't allow a cackle what she gave a cackle no no she was she was begging begging to give a cackle she's like can i cackle here it's not gertrude's not really a cackle but it's such a good cackle moment and word for word and alex you may not be aware but i have an excellent cackle here let me cackle for you it was an excellent cackle do you we have it on tape? Yes. There is. Patreon bonus.

It's buried somewhere. I will see if I can't find it. Your mum does an excellent cackle. Oh, yeah. But Bertra is not a cackler. No, she's not. And your mum was well disappointed by that. This is from AGVZ.

Brand. Season four was my favourite so far in terms of sound design. What is your creative process for building soundscapes and has this changed over the course of the series? My process is... What's your process? My process for designing... Give an example of your stage direction, Johnny. My process for designing stage

directions is I will have an idea and then I'll write it in as unhelpful or counterintuitive a way as possible uh such as the world goes wrong uh is a is a classic i feel like you may have done one somewhere although this might have been season two where it's something you genuinely put some version of it's all a bit much something like that it's all a bit much that sounds about right

in my defense it was all a bit much, Alex. What does that mean? It's all a bit much. And then I'll hand it over to Alex, and Alex will say, so what does this mean? I need to know interior, exterior, time of day. And I'll be like, interior or exterior? What a good question, conceptually, given this space exists outside of time. Hmm.

And then Alex will say, just go away. I'll figure it out well no we have interior exterior and eldritch that's fine eldritch is fine it means the dot try and make it sound weird without making the speech unintelligible which is fine until we're revisiting an old eldritch and you can't pull the same tricks i.e jared hopwood situation uh so interior exterior weather time of day and i think I had it added. They all just happen at some point, Alex. I don't think time of day is really... No one cares about time of day.

I added an extra criteria I haven't told Johnny, which I have been keeping a note of, which is an extra column in there, which is nonsense, question mark, which is what nonsense has Johnny forgotten to mention? Where it'd be the kind of thing where you do this and then he'd be like, oh, I did, you know, I didn't write. There is a brass band playing the entire time i don't know how i've never put in

a brass band um but that kind that kind of thing in terms of how you build it it was woodwind unfortunately i've made a bit of a rod for my own back in magnus in that we have a very set of consistent rules regarding soundscaping that people have a very set of consistent rules regarding soundscaping that people have picked up on in a good way so stuff like static applies in certain situations and doesn't types of static are different that kind of thing which means that handover in terms of soundscaping is a bit of a nightmare at this stage it's a weird one as well because it means that a lot of there's a lot of theory that's been built around different sorts of static static is something I've been very bad about consistently writing it oh it's been consistent

from maya yes i know to the point where i've had to insist on extra stage directions to pick out when something's compelled or not things like that but the the secret dirty secret i don't like admitting which is that at magnus i'm still doing the soundscaping yeah vocals are done by a couple of people elizabeth moffat i'm going to shout out in this one she's been really good this season she's she's excellent thank you elizabeth and brock winstead has been doing most of the music i think it's been one oh we actually shot him as well yes we did he is the um he's the cop the police officer in america forgot the cop's name uh musterman yes yes yeah he's musterman um so he got shot because he is actually american so we were like hey can

you can you can you be an american cop and then get shot by an old man um but he said yes in terms of soundscaping it's a big thing i can't go into here like i could run workshops on it that would last a long time but generally speaking the best way that we do is you find out where the thing is happening you add in three layers you need a close layer a mid layer and a far layer and you need a base layer a mid layer and a treble layer how those two interact so you could have distant treble and close level you basically have to hit those otherwise your soundscape is going to feel a bit flat. There's an exception of the Archivist's Office, which is a dead room and has been from the beginning.

But beyond that, it's a lot of finding the right sound effects or recording one yourself and then tweaking a tenth of a second 50, 60 times and lots of listen to it not right, listen to it not right, and just trial and error. I'd love to say there's a magic sauce that isn't. It's just you keep pouring time in, and stuff comes out the other end. Alex is radically overcomplicating it, as always.

You just write it in italics. You know what? Johnny's right. You just left the line at right in italics. It's fine. Square brackets, that's the key. Or you don't write it in italics, and then you just go, oh, yeah, that is... And then you remind them later It's actually very simple Don't request soundscape changes

After it's recorded That's a good one I've never done that I'm not gonna Although actually I was listening back to 160 And I was thinking Don't do that It's a right Oh, yeah. And I was thinking... Don't do that.

It's a right. Right, okay, we're going to keep going. We're going to keep going. This is a story-related one, which I know a lot of people have asked. Didn't Martin say that Gertrude had been shot at least three times when he saw the body? Yet the recording of Elias only has one gunshot. Something happened in the sound editing some

might say that someone before he took the next someone might say that uh certain soundscapers misread misread the script the tape stopped and elias took two more shots yeah so basically what happened like in canon and this is the one time i will 100 this is word of god after the tape stopped turned out gertrude was too much of a badass to die from just a single gunshot she lunges at elias elias screams uh like a scared child and fires wildly three times misses gertrude gets a machete from under the desk cackling cackling uh lunges at him but oh two more shots of the chest and gertrude finally goes down it's not that alex misread the script i i need this i need this formally on the record okay because this this is the kind of thing that can get away from us

hi everyone this is alex speaking as alex this isn't even like alex as character this is just alex being alex This isn't a thing. The fact that there was one gunshot there is not a thing. It's not. It's just... I think I made a gaffe over 160 episodes, and I'm sorry. I've disappointed you, but more importantly, I've disappointed myself.

You've disappointed my mother, Alex. I mean, I don't know that, actually. I categorically have a mum of me. She thinks I'm great. Tell you what what we can do George Lucas in 10 years we can remaster it

and Gertrude shot first yep oh that all got real oh I'm so disappointed that's alright

I'm sorry mate this is from Bone God is it it is it's from Bone God if we were to take one lesson

moral away from the story thus far what would you like it to be sometimes okay people make mistakes in uh editing and that's okay and it doesn't need to be it's important to forgive it doesn't need to be linked it's important to forgive a lesson or moral oh god it's it's a really difficult one, because Magnus, certainly seasons three and four, have for me been an examination of a lot of questions about choice and responsibility, and what your responsibilities, I guess, are when you find yourself in situations, which we all do, when you find yourself in situations which we all do where you are beholden to forces larger than yourself and the idea that what you can do is constrained and what the results of your choices are are unclear and you can take actions and you can do things and the results of those actions aren't actually up to you but that's very much me working through a lot of my

own thoughts. But I don't really have an explicit moral. It's a really difficult question, a difficult situation, both in the show and in real life. It's like, I've seen there's quite a lot of discussion about the ending of 160 and whether it means that uh for instance uh all gertrude's actions were pointless or whether tim died for nothing oh yeah yeah good point and it's a real complicated question because on the one hand i mean kind of yes like this is horror on a cosmic scale and one of the cornerstones of cosmic horror is fundamentally that the actions of the individual broadly speaking are never going to do good pretty much but for instance tim he didn't actually save the world but that wasn't really

what he was there for he was there for revenge nobody involved knew quite how pointless i guess their their whole people were telling him please don't go off on a massive revenge but also fix your problem but also it is still very much the closure of his arc i mean very few of us actually get our real life arcs closed saving the world and that doesn't mean that they're pointless it's my most favorite way to start a story is it sounds peculiar there's nothing i enjoy more than starting a story with an a death that is not significant so not a death that is an opening to a mystery it's a it's a personal preference of i love a character has died and that's just a thing that's happened as opposed to a something that you hang a coat

off if you know what i mean but no like tim's tim's story is is a tragedy but i don't think it's the revelation of its lack of meaningful consequence within the wider universe invalidates those choices like the choices we take are our choices regardless of what their actual result turns out to be it's the same with gertrude i mean in many ways gertrude is kind of me working through a lot of my thoughts on the idea of you know the ends justify the means because gertrude does full-on atrocities she does does horrible, ruthless things in order to, from her point of view, save the world. And turns out, at the very end,

she didn't need to. And even those actions fundamentally spurred the course that brings about that end. And it's the idea that the ends may justify the means but you can never be sure what those ends are actually going to be gertrude is an excellent demonstration of something i've been doing a lot of reading about in the last year just pure like personal interest if

you're interested look into both the mathematics and the actual just philosophy of existential risks as a thing there's a huge amount of writing which i think people will start to realize there's a lot of gertrude in there which is talking about if there is an existential risk where literally everything's at stake there is an argument to be made that all acts are moral if they mitigate that it is not a to be clear this isn't a stance this is a philosophical you heard it here first folks oh alex yes wants to just do a lot of murder to save the world but if i put the entire world at risk first it makes all of my actions fine oh that's smart loophole but in all seriousness gertrude's a good example of

that because it's a good way of tying back into the cosmic horror which is the world is complicated and it actively doesn't like you yeah so it's an uncaring hostile universe how do you deal with that generally speaking as a character you either find your own meaning which means that how it interacts with the wider world as long as your own meaning is intact is okay which i'd argue tim sort of hits that note yeah or you engage on the gertrude route which is no all of this is determined externally in which case you get in some really weird personal morality because one of them's got to give you can't have both you can't be objectively and subjectively in the right really doesn't work like that yeah so i don't think there are any

core morals of magnus you create fictional spaces that they're not necessarily direct metaphors but they work in a in a space where people can put metaphorical frameworks on them and see how they see how they stretch and there's nothing more didactic than going in and saying here is the takeaway lesson yeah and also because there is no like there are no easy answers to these questions that can be neatly popped in podcast format yeah you know like people have put uh like obviously people quite often put a an anti-capitalist sort of um metaphorical framework over magnus which 100 works um but it's not quite as simple as the entities are a metaphor for capitalism. Yeah.

You know, the entities can be a metaphor for a lot of things. And I hope that Magnus provides people a space to work through their own thoughts on stuff. Okay, so we're going to round up this first Q&A with one last question. Okay. This is from Chucking Woods 2000. Alex. Sorry, Chucking 2000 Woods? No, Chucking Woods 2000. Chucking a wood 2000 times?

Chucking, okay, it's... Or the 2000th? It's clearly a... The 2000th Chucking Wood. It's clearly a 1970s horror based on like How Much Wood Would Wood Chuck Chuck, but the remake in the 2000s where it's like a reboot. but the remake in the 2000s where it's like a reboot or it's just a name chucking wood and there have been 1999 ancestors of identical names let's assume that so chucking woods the 2000th i guess according to johnny alex picture this johnny just fell into a lake oh no drunkenly

waving the complete season five script in his hand god do you save him first abandoning the script or do you just take the script and go home okay i'm really sorry chucking words why did i drink so much you have fundamentally misunderstood the level of paranoia that i have i rescue johnny laugh at the script that's kicking around in there knowing that if Johnny hasn't got multiple digital redundants cloud saved in separate locations that on his head be it and I'll put him back in the water so honestly I don't feel like there's much of a quandary there because if he hasn't this scenario assumes that Alex hasn't pushed me into the lake because he was dissatisfied with the season five scripts you know what that's also a valid point if Johnny is in there with the only copy of the script johnny deserves to be in there because he

has violated all of the safety protocols and i can't be held responsible for what i do in that situation but the core question of whether alex sees me as a valued friend or a writing machine i think is and i think that pretty much wraps up the q a um for for this episode we'll um we'll be returning with another one because we had way too many questions so many questions um so yeah we're basically going to do an un an anticlimactic bye followed by immediately carrying on at this end bye immediately carrying on at this end. Bye! Bye! Thanks for listening. For fans of heart-racing, bone-chilling, and mind-bending stories, Audible has everything you need. Audible is the leader in audiobooks, so you'll always find the best and freshest selection of mysteries and thrillers to choose from. Sometimes you just want to get lost in a classic whodunit. And sometimes you want to get wrapped up in a twisted new mystery where the tension is high,

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